Sitting in his office at Cyber Towers, HiTec City, L&T Hyderabad Metro Rail CEO Vivek B. Gadgil seems slightly on edge. Talking about L&T’s work in construction of Metro lines across several of India’s cities, Gadgil wonders why only in Hyderabad the media is “nosy”, and keen to run down every aspect of the Metro.
Indeed, ever since the engineering giant began work on the 72-km Hyderabad Metro line in June 2012, it’s been a series of hurdles. There have been protests from traders, heritage conservationists, green activists, politicians, not to forget its own run-INS with the Hyderabad Metro Rail Ltd, a corporate entity of the Telangana government. A PMO project monitoring group is also supervising the Metro, following the tussles with the TRS government. In September, there were even reports that the central government had taken over the project.
But at a recent meeting between the four—CM K. Chandrasekhara Rao, L&T chairman A.M. Naik, Gadgil, and...
